How in the Tech

How to View Websites at the Office that you Probably Shouldn’t Be

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 11, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Internet

In this time of economic downturn you probably don’t want to be pushing the envelope at your office and wasting company time by surfing the Internet. While every environment is different and maintains various levels of latitude it’s typically advised to not let your supervisor, or for that matter your peers, see you perusing Youtube when you should be working. You could very well be the target for the next round of layoffs.

Still, if your Internet withdrawal is so strong that you must just surf the service from Vanishd is for you. Currently in beta, Vanishd obstructs the view of the personal site by overlaying a sanctioned site – such as Google in the Youtube video below. It’s a little more technical than just hiding one browser window with another, which is probably what you are doing right now. Instead, think of it like two websites merged together where with a click of a button you can peer through the top layer and view a portion of the underlying layer.

As the end user, you have control over the size of the looking window by scrolling with the mouse wheel. To cause the looking window to vanish you can either move it off the browser window or right-click with the mouse. By default, the hidden site can be thought of as read-only in that you can’t interact with it. If you need to, that is possible by left clicking within the looking window. Easy enough right?

There are two caveats however – Vanishd doesn’t work with all websites, I had particular troubles with content centered around Adobe Flash. Most importantly, the hidden sites will still show up on your browser history and cache so any audits would likely uncover your sneaky behavior. Still, it’s up to you to decide if any of this is worth it!